Timothy Olyphant plays US Marshal Raylan Givens. Givens is cut from the same cloth as Olyphant's Deadwood character, Seth Bullock, but I like this character even more. He is almost like an Old West lawman plucked from the 19th century and deposited in modern day rural Kentucky.
Givens has a stone-cold yet charming way of talking people down. He certainly knows how to handle himself and a weapon. He speaks very directly in a hyper-polite manner, augmented by a tendency to back up his quiet words with sudden, brief violence. It also helps that he has plenty of personal demons to battle, including an outlaw father, an interesting ex-wife (for whom he may still carry a torch), and anger issues. All this makes for a character I can care about, played by an actor who nails the subtleties of a complex portrayal.
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